A Short History of Gatesville

Gatesville is the seat of Gates County and its only incorporated town, a place of a few hundred people in the middle of the county where a courthouse has stood since the Revolution¹. Before it was a town it was a landing, and before it had a courthouse it had a creek.

Before 1779 Bennetts Creek Landing

Bennetts Creek begins in the middle of Gates County, where Duke, Harrell and Raynor swamps run together, and winds down to the Chowan River. William S. Powell's North Carolina Gazetteer says it takes its name from Richard Bennett, governor of Virginia from 1652 to 1655, and that it was already drawn on John Ogilby's map of 1671². The same gazetteer records that the town on its bank was first called Bennetts Creek Landing¹.

The earliest traveler's account tied to the spot comes from the Quaker preacher George Fox, who crossed this country around 1672. Writing a history of the county in 1916, Isaac S. Harrell read Fox's journal as describing a ride of about twelve miles from Somerton, Virginia, past a single house, to a lone dwelling on what Fox called Bonner's Creek, the stream now named Bennetts, at the site of present-day Gatesville. Fox spent the night and went on down the creek toward the Chowan and Edenton³. A 1978 state park plan tells the same story with a date attached, placing Fox in camp on Bennetts Creek on September 20, 1672⁴. Both accounts are interpretations of Fox's journal rather than a survey, so treat the exact spot as tradition.

What made the landing matter was the water. Harrell called Bennetts Creek the only navigable stream in the county, and he described farmers around Gatesville sending what little they had to sell down the creek to the Chowan, while their neighbors near the Virginia line looked north to the Dismal Swamp canal and Norfolk instead⁵. The Methodist bishop Francis Asbury noticed the same thing on a visit in March 1799, writing in his journal that the creek gave a landing at Gates Court House and reached the Chowan a few miles farther on⁶.

1779–1831 Gates Court House

The General Assembly created Gates County in 1779 from pieces of Chowan, Hertford and Perquimans counties and named it for Horatio Gates, the general credited with the American victory at Saratoga in 1777⁷. The act that formed the county also called for commissioners to pick a central site for a courthouse. According to the courthouse's National Register nomination, the first building went up around 1781, when the legislature levied a tax to pay for it, and once it stood, the landing became known as Gates Court House⁸. The county government's own history puts it a year earlier, saying a courthouse, a prison and stocks were built in 1780, and it describes the 1781 tax as money to finish the public buildings⁹. The two dates may describe the same project at different stages; this page gives both.

The village had a post office early. A catalog of North Carolina postal history lists Daniel Southall as the first postmaster at Gates Court House, appointed March 9, 1803¹⁰.

The present name came from the legislature. In its 1830–31 session the General Assembly declared that the place then known as Gates Court House would from then on be known as Gatesville, and the post office followed on February 27, 1831⁸¹⁰. Powell's gazetteer and a 2006 National Register nomination both give 1830 as the year the town was incorporated¹¹¹. The act quoted in the courthouse nomination is the renaming act, and its full text is not published online, so whether it also set up a town government is not settled here. The charter Gatesville operates under today is a 1923 private act, discussed below.

1834–1836 The Brick Courthouse

By 1834 the first courthouse needed serious repair, and the county court chose to replace it. To pay for the new building the justices set a tax of fifty cents on each poll and twenty cents on every hundred dollars of land value. That August a majority of the court scaled the plans back, calling for a building forty feet square with no porch or portico and with the courtroom on the ground floor. The work finished in May 1836, the court held its first session in the new building that August, and the old courthouse was sold to Marmaduke Norfleet for $33.50¹².

The court minutes quoted in the nomination show the justices protecting their investment. They put the clerk, William Daughtry, in charge of cleaning the building and airing it out, bought three dozen spit boxes, and posted a list of fines: fifty cents for chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor, fifty cents for writing on the walls, and a dollar for cutting the woodwork¹².

The man paid for building it was Dr. John B. Baker, a physician and large landowner who served in the state House of Commons in 1811 and the state Senate from 1818 to 1838. The nomination records a second payment to him of $1,673 in May 1836 and smaller payments to the sheriff, James R. Riddick, and others for extra work and for painting the brick. It also notes that Baker's estate included enslaved people and more than 2,000 acres in the county, and that it is not known whether he designed the building or whether men he hired or held in slavery did the work¹³. The same document says the courthouse lot was probably land a John Baker deeded in 1794; since it also gives Dr. Baker's birth year as 1785, the 1794 seller was more likely an older man of the same name¹³.

Fifty cents for spitting on the floor, fifty cents for writing on the walls, a dollar for cutting the woodwork.

The building has changed in stages. The brick was stuccoed and the small cast-iron balcony added in 1904, and a rear wing with a jail went on in 1940. When the nomination was written in 1976 the county was about to move its offices and courts into a new building that June. The nomination ranks the 1836 courthouse among the few antebellum courthouses left in North Carolina and calls it a restrained late Federal design¹⁴. It was listed on the National Register the same year, and the county reports that it now houses the Gates County Public Library and the Gates County Historical Society⁹.

1799–1860 Academies, Churches & the Clerk

In the first half of the nineteenth century the courthouse village was also a church and school town. Asbury's journal records him preaching at Gates Court House to "many serious people" on Sunday, March 10, 1799, and administering the sacrament there⁶. Harrell found that Asbury kept returning after 1801, sometimes preaching in the courthouse itself, that he ordained a local man named R. Harrell as a deacon there in 1803, and that the Gatesville Methodist church was built around 1828. The legislature chartered the Gatesville Academy in 1832, the same year it chartered an academy at Sunbury¹⁵. Decades later the suffragist Elsie Riddick, born in 1876 on her father's farm six miles from Gatesville, attended a private academy in the town that taught boys and girls together until she was fifteen¹⁶.

The county's farm economy rested on slavery. The first federal census, in 1790, counted 5,372 people in Gates County: 3,080 free white residents, 73 free Black residents and 2,219 enslaved people¹⁷. The courthouse was where that system was written down. Henry L. Eure, who built the side-passage house that still stands at 212 West Main Street around 1850, was clerk of court from the mid-1850s, and his name appears, from 1854 to 1861, on the county's certificates registering enslaved people to work in the Great Dismal Swamp¹⁸.

1861–1915 War and Memory

A Civil War Trails marker that stood beside the courthouse, recorded by the Historical Marker Database before it went missing, said the county militia was headquartered in the 1836 building and that the Gates Guards were organized and mustered into Confederate service there as Company B of the 1st North Carolina Infantry. It said men of the company signed their names on the wall of a second-floor room before they left, and that the county's records, which go back to 1779, were hidden at Allen Smith's house for the rest of the war¹⁹.

Gatesville is also where William Paul Roberts is buried. Born in Gates County in 1841, he enlisted in 1861 and was made a brigadier general in February 1865. State historians call him, at twenty-three, the youngest general officer in the Confederate army. After the war he represented the county in the constitutional conventions of 1868 and 1875, served as state auditor from 1880 to 1888, and was later a U.S. consul in Victoria, British Columbia. He died in Norfolk in 1910, and a state highway marker on NC 37 in Gatesville points to his grave nearby²⁰. The county government's history page gives his age as twenty; the state's biographical dictionary and its marker program both say twenty-three, and this page follows them⁹.

Fifty years after the war, on July 18, 1915, a Confederate monument was unveiled across the street from the courthouse¹⁹. It still stands. In 2022 a group of county residents placed a marker beside it that says the honors of that era do not reflect the county's values today and names unity and racial equality as the community's own²¹.

1880s–1923 A Railroad-Era Town

The arrival of the railroad in the county in the 1880s brought a building boom to Gatesville that lasted into the early twentieth century. The 2006 nomination for the Eure-Roberts House lists the results along the town's four main streets, Court, Main, High and Church: two-story frame houses with scrollwork, lacy porches and bracketed cornices, among them the Richard H. Williams House and the Eason-Sawyer House of about 1885 and the William T. Cross House of 1898, a Queen Anne Baptist church on Court Street in 1908, and a 1911 house on High Street built from Sears, Roebuck plans and materials. The oldest house in town, the Lemuel P. Hayes House on Main Street, dates to about 1820¹⁸.

Older houses were brought up to date. When Edward R. Roberts bought the Eure house in 1901 for $750, he and his wife, Annie Cowper Roberts, added a wraparound porch, a bracketed cornice and a shingled front gable, and a room with its own porch door that may have served as his drugstore. By 1920 the census listed Roberts as a druggist, and according to the nomination a branch of the Roberts Drug Company gave the county community of Roduco its name¹⁸.

The boom was a matter of buildings more than people. The federal census counted 232 residents in Gatesville in 1890, 200 in 1900 and 203 in 1910²². The Eure-Roberts nomination, citing a 1991 architectural survey of the county, describes a town of about 300 at the end of the nineteenth century with six general stores, a furniture store, two confectioneries, a drugstore and several hotels¹⁸. The census figures are the official count; the larger number may reflect people living just outside the town line.

The town's present charter dates from this period too. When the General Assembly amended it in 2009, the act identified the charter as Chapter 88 of the Private Laws of 1923, amended in 1933, which provides for a mayor and three commissioners. The 2009 act moved both offices to four-year, staggered terms²³.

1882–1951 Reid's Grove School

Reid's Grove School, at 931 Main Street on NC 37, carries a name with roots in 1882. That October, Wilson and Mariah Hudgins deeded a quarter acre on the Somerton Road to the three-member committee of the Gatesville School District. One of the three was Asbury Reid, a Black farmer and the son of a free Black landowner named Micajah Reid, and the nomination suggests that is why the school on the lot was known as Reid's Grove by the 1920s²⁴.

The present building went up in 1927 with help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which shared the cost of rural schools for Black children across the South when local people and governments put up money too. The state's Rosenwald correspondence preserved in the nomination tells a hard story: Black residents of the district signed a $1,000 note to get the school built, the county board started construction on a two-room plan and then sought money for three rooms, and the state's Black Rosenwald agent, George E. Davis, pressed the fund on the community's behalf. The school opened on November 5, 1927, and the fund paid $700 toward it that December²⁴.

Reid's Grove taught children through the eighth grade until the spring of 1951; older students went on to the T. S. Cooper Training School in Sunbury and, after it burned in the 1940s, to Butler High School. The county took over the building in 1951. It later held the county's 4-H club, then a library for Black residents before integration in the 1960s, and it was renamed the Mitchell Building for Howard Mitchell, whom the nomination calls North Carolina's first Black Cooperative Extension agent. The Economic Improvement Council has owned it since 1999. It was listed on the National Register on August 30, 2011²⁴.

Present The Town Today

The 2020 Census counted 267 people in Gatesville, on 0.404 square miles of land, and the Census Bureau estimated 260 residents on July 1, 2025²⁶. The 1836 courthouse, the Eure-Roberts House and Reid's Grove School are all on the National Register. Listing on the Register, by itself, puts no obligation or restriction on a private owner who maintains or changes a building with private money; obligations attach only when federal money, a federal license, a grant or a tax credit is involved²⁷.

The line matters in three practical ways. Inside it, the town's property tax is added to the county's; the commuter cost chapter has the published rates and their fiscal year. Building permits and inspections run through the county's office for both the town and the unincorporated county, as the building chapter explains. And FEMA lists Gatesville as its own flood-insurance community with its own effective map date, separate from the county's²⁹, so check the parcel itself on the state's flood map viewer rather than assuming. For houses old enough to have a story of their own, the older homes listings are the place to start.